graduating next year with little to no direction

Graduate School
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<p>I'm a Psychology major with a minor in Mathematics and philosophy. I'll be graduating next year and I have no idea what I'm going to do when I graduate. I've transferred schools junior year, so my college experience was not quite what I was expecting. During the school year I have to focus on academics because I have Aspergers which requires me to give much more of a concerted effort than most people. I have participated in very little at my new transfer school, but I have one year left to possibly compensate. I have not taken the GRE or even considered it yet though. I was thinking law or graduate school.</p>

<p>My GPA at UWW is 3.51, at Bradley 3.77</p>

<p>I would love to study at an institution that is characterized of more personalities like mine. I never did fit in with the bro crowd at my University. Would I be a competitive candidate for University of Chicago or Northwestern? Do any of you have grad school suggestions for me based on a good fit?</p>

<p>I'm not sure at this point if grad school or law school is right for me right away, but who knows. I've made very few friends in undergraduate school, so I would like to go somewhere where I can possibly meet more people who are quirky like me. Maybe I should travel the world. What state would be good for people who live a bohemian lifestyle? </p>

<p>Also, on the GRE, why would someone make you memorize vocab???? IT does not test for anything other than trivial words that no one would use in their everyday life? How is this section valid? I looked through it and it is not a valid form of measuring crystallized or even fluid intelligence. All it does is force you to possibly memorize arbitrary words from the dictionary that may or may not be on the test, so what gives?</p>

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<p>

Who says that they are trying to measure intelligence? My friends who are well-read have done very well on the verbal section - maybe that’s what the test-makers are going for.</p>

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<p>The first question you need to ask yourself is, “Why do I want to go to graduate school and in what discipline?”</p>

<p>If you can’t answer that question to your own satisfaction, you certainly won’t be able to convince a graduate admissions committee.</p>

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<p>I second the comment about not memorizing vocab. Scored 800 and didn’t memorize a word - but I read and write, a lot. The old GRE rewarded extreme literacy.</p>

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<p>I would add that this emphasis makes sense, given that much of graduate school, in social science/humanities disciplines, is about reading and writing, not listening to lectures. Learning to quickly read and analyze passages is an important skill when you have hundreds of pages of reading per class.</p>

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<p>polarscribe, I think your 800 is mediated by the fact that I think you went into journalism :P</p>

<p>I read a myriad of editorials/journals, and I only did somewhat well on the Verbal. Luckily for me I applied to programs that didn’t really weight Verbal that much.</p>

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<p>You have a multi-part question here with some interesting points. I will have to think more and come back to you when I’m not so tired, and it is a bit harder to answer you because I don’t know you (or what a bro crowd is.) But, you chose an interesting combintation of major and minors, and you gave yourself some options for the future.</p>

<p>Just about the GRE–many people don’t find it makes sense and some schools rely on it more than others. My math/cs major was busy and decided not to prepare for it except to take a couple of online practice tests for timing and pacing the week before, online. No memorizing of words. She got a 93% in Verbal which I attribute to reading a good smattering of classic High School literature, and also doing some lit reading at school on her own time for pleasure.</p>

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<p>hey, when you have the chance brownparent, can you follow up? I just want a job or task that will keep me busy and happy or content. I do not see myself working at a desk or any job that is repetitive… I don’t know, I get bored and disinterested incredibly fast. I have Aspergers but generally you wouldn’t be able to tell I do. Nothing at my current university excites me. I just spend my free time working out and doing schoolwork and listening to music. I have not found a crowd that I can relate to; perhaps I’m just a misanthrope. I find a lot of people bothersome and to be frank stupid. The bros are the people with the backwards baseball cap and the gum smacking lips with the ******bag attitude. I was destined to go to a quirky small liberal arts college, but at the time, I was not smart enough (I guess?) to get in? I relate with that crowd much better. I would feel more comfortable with going to a grad school with grads and undergrads who have similar interests like me. That is not to generalize and say that all public big universities are characteristic of bros and people who are not serious, but psychologically, it is hindering my social life and progress as a person. I think I have lots of potential, but I have not been molded enough I think</p>

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<p>The problem is that you seem to want to go to grad school in order to meet people, but one has really has to be motivated academically to succeed in grad school. Focus on what interests you. I can tell you that if you find a grad program that you like and that you can get accepted into, the people will be more interesting since they will have similar interests to yours and they will be more mature and intelligent than the average student.</p>

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<p>Every job is, at some level, repetitive. Only through lots of practice do you get really, really good at something - good enough for someone to pay you to do it.</p>

<p>One trick might be to develop a skill that is in demand across a variety of fields. My academic and professional life has revolved around communications. Within that sphere, I’ve worked on political campaigns, for international auto racing teams, as a college sports journalist and now a park ranger-interpreter. The settings and messages have been different, but my role has been fundamentally the same: develop and implement effective communication platforms.</p>

<p>All that said, grad school is not a place to meet people. It is a place to study and conduct research in a specific subdiscipline. In fact, if anything, it gets MORE repetitive - a Ph.D dissertation is a laser-focused piece of new research or knowledge that requires intense and sometimes mind-numbing work centered around just one fundamental question.</p>

<p>So if you want to go to grad school, you first need to decide what it is you want to do. What are you passionate about? What drives you? What do you enjoy? What do you want to do with your master’s/doctorate?</p>

<p>Again, if you can’t answer those questions, no graduate school is going to admit you, no matter how badly you want in.</p>

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<p>yeah, but I heard from admissions committee when I emailed them that is a myth that in order to gain admittance to grad school you have to know exactly what you want to do. I mean, who at 21 knows without a doubt what they will do in five more years? I mean some people are certain, but they’re misled by this certainty because no one can product the job market and circumstances that will affect a person in the future. I mean don’t grad schools understand this? Whatever happened to the aesthetics of more learning? Maybe I’m truly ignorant of the whole process. I have an appointment this wednesday at Uw-madison law school to gain further insight onto the whole admissions process because I really do not have a clue on how grad or law school differ from undergrad work. I just thought it was just taking the next level</p>

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<p>On a more practical note, how do you plan to finance grad or law school? If you are thinking about loans, consider what debts you & your family will owe by the time you get your undergrad degree and how that may increase while you’re going for more education/degrees. Depending on your major, there MAY be SOME funding for grad school but most psych majors I know had to pay for much of their own grad degree. They WERE focused on what they wanted out of grad school & focused their studies on that.</p>

<p>For law degrees, it’s very rare to get funding other than rare independent scholarships & some loans. There are many lawyers struggling to pay back their loans as there is no shortage of attorneys as far as anyone knows.</p>

<p>You can probably get accepted to a law school without knowing what you want from it, but do you want to spend those resources without KNOWING that you want that field? I’d STRONGLY encourage you to do some volunteering/work in fields you think you’re interested in–psych, law or whatever. You can do this upon graduation before you choose your next steps and make it more meaningful.</p>

<p>If you want to travel and ponder your next step, consider going to Europe and working on an organic farm. It seems to be a very popular thing for young grads & young adults to do. It should be fairly inexpensive, but you may need to work a bit before you can afford to do this. If you have undergrad loans, you will also have to consider how you will make payments on those.</p>

<p>You could also apply to teach English in another country–I have friends who have done this in China, Taiwan and Japan. I am sure there are programs for other places as well. You could also join AmeriCorp, Peace Corp, Vista and other organizations to do good while you ponder.</p>

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<p>dlbecker, you don’t have to know <em>exactly</em> what you want to do, but you do need to have a sense of what you’re going to do when you finish your degree. You haven’t even been able to say which field you’d like to pursue, which means you can’t even start the application process.</p>

<p>A graduate degree is not “two (or three, or six) more years of college.” You don’t take a bunch of classes in a big, wide array of fields. You intensely study one field, take a few classes and in research-oriented programs, conduct a specific, highly-focused research project that will make you the world expert in that one area. In fact, you don’t apply to “graduate school,” you apply specifically to individual departments, whose faculty directly review your qualifications.</p>

<p>The single most important factor in graduate admissions is the Statement of Purpose, in which you explain your reasons for pursuing graduate study and what you’re interested in researching. If you can’t even tell us what field you want to study, you have no hope of being accepted to a graduate program.</p>

<p>In law school, you study nothing but the law for three years, in preparation for a comprehensive exam that would admit you to legal practice. A law school might well take you without a plan - but that’s because to them, you’re a paying customer, shelling out perhaps $200,000.</p>

<p>Graduate school of any flavor is a significant investment of your time, energy and money - all of which are limited quantities. You need to have some sense of what your investment is going to return to you in the future.</p>

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<p>My advice: if you haven’t already, start drafting your statement of purpose for grad school right away. It is essential to your graduate school application package. Have several people (professors, departmental adviser, etc) read it for you and give you feedback. Working on the statement of purpose will also help you realize you do in fact have direction; you just may not have put it into words yet.</p>

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<p>what do you mean “work on an organic farm?” Like insofar as organic food??? I’m not well suited to work on anything that involves fast manual labor skills. In fact, i got fired from Jimmy John’s and Subway because I could not cut the bread the right way and was too slow (holding up the lunch line). My mother has strongly discouraged me from applying to any fast-food, or any job that involves spatial mechanics that is expected to be achieved within a very short amount of time. I’ve tried hard to move quickly, but I just mess up… this is why it is incredibly hard to keep a part-time job in college because most fast-food places would not hire me now; or if they did I would not last long. I tried a summer ago, volunteering on a Kibbutz in Israel, and basically, the staff had to move me around quite frequently because I was slowing down everyone.</p>

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<p>A few points that I want to pick up from previous posts and rephrase.</p>

<p>– Graduate school is not merely more years added to your education. Graduate school demands a higher level of interest, research, and ability to work independently. Good undergraduate students don’t necessarily make good graduate students.</p>

<p>– Graduate school does not have the same, or even a similar, social environment that an undergraduate school does. There will be graduate student get-togethers and celebrations in your department, but not many. Yes, you will meet people in your program; however, you’ll have to make an effort to socialize with them because everyone is basically working hard in isolation. Professional schools such as law and medicine may be different, though. I don’t know.</p>

<p>– Graduate school is designed for specialization. If you don’t yet know what you want to specialize in, you aren’t ready for graduate school. Yes, you may not know EXACTLY what you will do, but you should have direction and focus.</p>

<p>– Getting broader work experience before applying to graduate school may help you determine your goals.</p>

<p>– The GRE verbal tests high-level reading comprehension and analysis, as well as the ability to quickly understand nuanced meanings. Yes, the vocabulary seems ridiculous; however, depending on your field, you may encounter a lot of those words in academic articles. Science programs don’t care so much about the verbal score (as long as it isn’t too low), and humanities programs don’t care that much about the quantitative (again, as long as it isn’t in the basement.) Remember that a verbal score in the mid-600s is still in the 90th+ percentile.</p>

<p>– For most programs, the GRE is only a qualifier. As long as you get a score close to their average score, you’ll be fine.</p>

<p>It doesn’t sound to me that you’re ready for graduate school since you don’t know what you want to do and since you don’t yet have a clear idea of what graduate school entails. I think you need to do some careful thinking about what you want to do.</p>

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<p>Oh, one more point: graduate students can be quirky everywhere. You cannot count on finding people with Asperger’s in any given program, but you cannot count it out, either. I know one such person with a PhD in computer science and another working toward a graduate degree in musical performance.</p>